Digital Innovation Challenge 2021: We won!

The Digital Innovation Challenge is a 24-hour event hosed by the German Informatics Society. In the 2021 challenge, the theme was sustainability: In 24 hours, we should make a piece of software that is able to contribute to the Sustainable Development Goals defined by the United Nations.

Together with three peers, we took a look at the problem of impulse online purchases: Comsumption in general accounts for a significant share of the world’s CO2 emissions. Impulse purchases often create little value for the consumer in the long term while still having to be manufactured and shipped. Therefore, we created the browser extension ByeBuy. The premise is simple: By delaying purchases by a few days, users think more about whether they actually need the item in question. To accomplish this, ByeBuy creates a button located right next to the buy button that puts the item on a list and asks you after a couple of days if you still want to buy the item. This is the extension in action:

With ByeBuy, we placed first among all participating teams! You can check out the source code and a more detailed description in German on GitHub at https://github.com/Team42-DIC/byebuy.